The Fishmeal Revolution: The Industrialization of the Humboldt Current Ecosystem

Abstract

This book is a testament to the importance of integrating the history of fisheries and marine ecosystems into analyses of food industries and agricultural production. It blurs the lines between terrestrial and marine industries to create a comprehensive account of the development of Peruvian and Chilean fisheries in the context of the expansion of global food production in the second half of the twentieth century. Moreover, Kristin A. Wintersteen stresses the importance of environmental changes in her historical analysis of agricultural products. In so doing, she not only makes the Humboldt Current environment the protagonist of the historical analysis but also explores the challenges posed by El Niño's climatic phenomena and its impact on local and global economic, social, and political systems. This book is therefore crucial for agricultural historians as well as for ocean historians, Latin American scholars, and for the environmental humanities more broadly.The Fishmeal Revolution encompasses six chapters that examine the different environmental and historical processes that have shaped the industrialization of the Southeast Pacific. In chapter 1, Wintersteen describes the Humboldt Current environment and presents a carefully drawn picture of the human history of this ecoregion, delving into deep geological and human time. She highlights the knowledge created by Indigenous societies in the pre-Columbian era and the production of colonial and postcolonial natural histories. Chapter 2 focuses on the commodification of marine ecosystems in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It examines the industrialization of products like fishmeal and fish oil in the North Atlantic and North Pacific, which fueled the fertilizer and swine- and poultry-production industries. Notably, this chapter entangles the modernization experiences of fisheries in the United States, Germany, and Japan, making it an interesting case study for global history methodology.Chapter 3 explores the political discourses surrounding fishery development in Peru and Chile in the mid-twentieth century. It focuses on the tensions between national and international actors who drift between welfare goals and profit-seeking initiatives. It also stresses the technological and infrastructural challenges to the industrialization of the Southeast Pacific. Chapter 4 is narrower in scope, examining the economic, scientific, and social processes linked to fishmeal production in the Peruvian locality of Chimbote during the industrial boom from 1957 and 1972. The last two chapters focus on the different responses developed by Peruvian and Chilean industries to the environmental challenges posed by El Niño and its impact on this vulnerable ecoregion. Specifically, chapter 5 examines the Peruvian case from the country's industrial dominance in the 1960s to the fisheries' collapse in 1972, stressing the global repercussions of these events. Finally, chapter 6 examines Chilean responses to the 1972 El Niño crisis, highlighting the adaptations and innovations created by local industry in the ensuing decades. Importantly, this chapter reflects on the ways in which cycles of abundance and decline have shaped human fishing activity, industrial growth, and their relation to the climatic variability of marine ecosystems.Methodologically, this book represents an excellent contribution to historiography by entangling different geographical scales, as it weaves together international and national policies and institutions, regional environments, and local communities. Moreover, Wintersteen devotes significant attention to the concept of translocalism, which she utilizes to underscore the impacts and links of the industrialization of the Humboldt Current environment in different places and societies. In so doing, she broadens the existing historiography of fisheries, developing planetary systemic thinking about human relations with marine environments.This book does fail to fully grasp the inequalities among actors from the Global North and Global South. For example, more could have been done to portray the asymmetries in power relations during the Cold War period. Similarly, Wintersteen could have paid more attention to the political and economic discourses that framed the development of the South American fishmeal industries. In particular, there is little mention of the developmentalist discourses of the mid-twentieth century that created the political framework that enabled the development of national industries and the extractivist agenda that empowered neoliberal reforms in Chile in the 1980s and Peru in the 1990s. By framing the analysis using these discourses, more agency could have been given to national actors in a historical context of increasing awareness of global inequalities between the northern and southern hemispheres and clashes between local and transnational agents.All in all, these shortcomings are minor in comparison with the remarkable contributions of this research to the environmental history of this region and the global food revolution of the twentieth century. Wintersteen makes a compelling intellectual case that assesses the entanglements of the maritime and terrestrial resources in our food chain. Moreover, the historical overview that this study offers reminds us of the vulnerability of global food systems to climatic fluctuations, creating a nuanced analysis of the ways in which people, knowledge, institutions, and national and international policies interact with dynamic environments.